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How Bruce Springsteen Made ‘Dancing in the Dark’: The Hit He Wrote in One Night Because He Had To
It is the most joyful-sounding record Bruce Springsteen ever made, and it was written in a fury. By early 1984, Springsteen had spent two years recording — first the stark, haunted demos that became Nebraska, then dozens upon dozens of full-band songs with the E Street Band for the album that would become Born in…
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How Jim Croce Made ‘Bad, Bad Leroy Brown’: The AWOL Soldier Who Became a Number One
The baddest man in the whole damn town was a real man, and Jim Croce met him in the Army. In the summer of 1973, Bad, Bad Leroy Brown — a swaggering, piano-pounding story song about a six-foot-four Chicago tough who finally picks the wrong fight — spent two weeks at number one in America…
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How Kim Carnes Made ‘More Love’: The Motown Plea She Turned Into Her First Top Ten
Before the world knew Kim Carnes as the voice of Bette Davis Eyes, she was a thirty-something songwriter whom the record business had been politely ignoring for a decade. Her breakthrough, when it finally came in the summer of 1980, was not one of her own songs. It was a thirteen-year-old Smokey Robinson record called…
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How Madonna Made ‘Like a Prayer’: The Gospel Confession That Cost Pepsi Its Nerve and Shook the Vatican
In March 1989, Madonna performed the most efficient vanishing act in pop history: she took a soft-drink company’s $5 million, gave them a wholesome commercial they could only air for about a day, and watched them cancel the deal while she kept the money. But the scandal that swallowed the headlines has always obscured the…
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How Paul Simon Made ‘Kodachrome’: A Trademark, a Ban, and the Brightest Number Two in Pop
Paul Simon is pop’s most famous perfectionist, a man known for spending days on a single track and months on a single line. So of course one of his biggest solo hits was recorded almost by accident, in spare time he had not expected to have, in a small Alabama studio he had booked for…
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How Roy Orbison Made ‘Running Scared’: Two Minutes, No Chorus, and One Impossible Final Note
There is a moment, near the end of Running Scared, when Roy Orbison’s voice climbs to a note so high and so full that it seems to leave the song behind altogether. For two minutes the record has done nothing but tighten — verse upon verse, each one louder and more desperate than the last,…
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How Air Supply Made ‘All Out of Love’: The Hit That Needed One Line Rewritten
The difference between a beloved Australian hit and one of the biggest American ballads of all time turned out to be a single line of lyric — and the nerve of a record-company president who told the songwriter, to his face, that his chorus was too weird. All Out of Love made Air Supply the…
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How Barry Manilow Made ‘Mandy’: The Song He Didn’t Want to Sing
In the autumn of 1974, Barry Manilow was a man whose career appeared to have stalled before it had properly begun. He was thirty-one years old, a Juilliard-trained musician who earned his living writing advertising jingles — the State Farm “Like a good neighbour” theme and the Band-Aid jingle were both his — and playing…
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How Billy Joel Made ‘Just the Way You Are’: The Dream Melody He Nearly Threw Away
Some songwriters hunt for melodies for months. Billy Joel’s most decorated song arrived while he was asleep — and then, having been handed a gift by his own subconscious, he very nearly threw it away. Just the Way You Are was dismissed by its composer as a sappy “chick song”, resisted by his band, and…
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How Bonnie Tyler Made ‘Holding Out for a Hero’: The Tractor-Chase Anthem That Took Two Years to Explode
Some songs are written for the radio. Holding Out for a Hero was written for a game of chicken played on tractors, by two teenagers, in a film about a town that had outlawed dancing. That it became one of the most durable anthems of the 1980s — a song that has since rescued scenes…